by Ty Tagami | Oct 5, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Georgia’s public school class of 2026 did better in math and a little worse in reading and writing on their SAT tests than students who graduated the year before.
The overall SAT score still rose. The mean score for public-school students in the state was 1031, up two points from last year, according to figures released by the Georgia Department of Education.
The rising score came despite a 4 percentage point increase in the proportion of students taking the test, the agency said, noting that scores often fall when participation rises.
At some point during their high school careers, 59% of public school students from the class of 2026 took the SAT. That is up from 55% of the class of 2025 and 52% of the class of 2024.
The mean score for evidence-based reading and writing for the class of 2026 was 525, and the mean score for math was 506, according to the education department’s numbers released last week.
Although math scores were lower, the mean increased four points from the class of 2025 while the mean for reading and writing fell one point.
by Ty Tagami | Oct 2, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Attentive Georgia voters will notice something different when they go to their polling places on Election Day: pen and paper.
Poll workers will log each voter in electronically, but they will also be recording voters’ names on a backup log using pen and paper.
The retro method is required by a rule adopted in June by the State Election Board, the appointed body that establishes voting procedures in Georgia.
Approved in a 4-0 vote by the five-member Republican-controlled board, with the support of the lone Democrat, the measure was introduced after digital check-in failures during the May primary.
“This will be your paper document to refer back to if there’s an audit, if there’s a forensic audit,” then-board member Janice Johnston said at the meeting, according to the official transcript.
“Now, will it be perfect? No,” said Johnston, who subsequently stepped down from the board. “Someone will forget to write a name down, but it is the paper document to go back to.”
Anne Dover, the election director in Cherokee County, one of the largest counties in Georgia, said this week that she was concerned the requirement could slow the check-in process and result in longer lines.
Dover also worried about errors. Many of her poll workers are retirees in their 70s. She has asked them to write legibly but noted they will be recording hundreds of names on a busy Election Day.
“I feel like they will — whoever they are that are so concerned about this, I think we know who it is — they will get the electronic version of the numbered list, which they always have access to, it comes from the poll books, and they will take that list and try to compare it with the written numbered list. And if they see any discrepancies, we’ll be before the state election board,” said Dover, who has been doing this work for two decades.
“And I can promise you that, especially in these larger counties like ours, there will be mistakes,” she said.
Robert Sinners, a spokesman for Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the top election official in Georgia, also said he expects delays.
“This additional step may slow down the check-in process,” he said.
by Ty Tagami | Oct 1, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit by the Trump administration seeking to obtain personal information about Georgia voters, and the state agency that sets election procedures did not pursue a proposed emergency rule concerning ballot secrecy.
At a special meeting of the State Election Board on Thursday, board members said they opposed a proposal by one member who sought to alter the way ballots are handled by poll workers.
Board member Salleigh Grubbs said she wanted to protect voter secrecy by having poll workers scan the ballots rather than allowing voters to do it themselves, which is the current procedure.
Her rule would have required voters to drop their ballots into secure boxes that poll workers would have emptied into scanners later, after shuffling the order of the ballots.
The proposal was intended to patch a known privacy hole in Georgia’s voting system. The flaw could allow observers armed with artificial intelligence to combine distinct public records in a way that links voters to their ballots.
Voter check-in records and ballot images are public documents, but the link between the two must by law be severed to maintain voter privacy.
A voter activist has contended that new AI tools combined with a preexisting weakness in Georgia’s voting system could empower malefactors to determine how people voted, potentially using that information to coerce voters into selecting preferred candidates.
Voting technology experts have confirmed the flaw exists.
A voter’s identity is supposed to be kept separate from the ballot record, but a seemingly random number remains on the digital record of the ballot.
The number can be decoded to deconstruct the order in which ballots were scanned.
Because records that show when voters checked into their polling places are public — and sequential — the two pieces of the puzzle can theoretically be assembled into a picture that links voters to their ballots, although check-in order does not always correlate with scanning order.
“To keep the published record anonymous, ballot scanners shuffle the electronic records randomly before releasing them. But a security vulnerability disclosed back in 2022 shows the shuffle can be reversed, and some states have not applied the software update that resolves it,” Princeton University researcher Max Springer wrote in a university technology blog in August.
Georgia is among those states, he wrote.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has already taken steps to address the flaw by restricting public access to some pieces of the puzzle.
Technical expert Ben Adida said at Thursday’s virtual meeting that the weakness in Georgia’s voting system is real and serious and needs to be addressed, but he said Raffensperger’s approach was technically good enough for now.
Adida, the executive director of VotingWorks, which makes election equipment, added that updating the voting machine software now to improve the randomization feature would introduce a far greater danger of election chaos.
He said it would be like updating the operating system on an iPhone before a big meeting.
“In my opinion, it’s far too risky to consider,” he said.
But he also acknowledged he was not a legal expert.
And Grubbs, a Republican appointee to the five-member board, contended that the countermeasures by Raffensperger, also a Republican, violate state transparency laws.
“We’re talking about legal issues of compromising constitutional and codified ballot secrecy and a quote unquote mitigation plan that the secretary came up with that is frankly illegal,” Grubbs said.
She also contended that Raffensperger’s solution to protect ballot secrecy was flawed and thus could lead to lawsuits over the constitutionality of the election result.
A local election chief said at the meeting that Grubbs’ proposal was impractical to implement just weeks ahead of the election.
Anne Dover, the election director in Cherokee County, told board members that to shuffle and scan ballots she would have to find and train 126 additional poll workers for Election Day plus 21 for early voting.
There is not enough time or money, she said, noting that her department’s training concludes Friday and that many counties have already finished theirs. Dover worried about inadequately trained poll workers mishandling ballots.
She also worried that voters would be suspicious about the handling of their ballots by anyone but themselves.
“I don’t want y’all to set us up for failure by putting this on us so last minute,” Dover said.
Board members Janelle King and Carolyn Roddy, both GOP appointees, said they opposed Grubbs’ measure.
“I’m not in favor of putting election officials through the wringer,” Roddy said.
Grubbs had asked to place her proposal on the agenda for a meeting Monday, but that did not occur.
The contract for the current voting system is due to expire soon, and state Rep. Victor Anderson, R-Cornelia, co-chairman of a joint House-Senate committee that is selecting the standards for a replacement system, sent Grubbs an email before the meeting advising against her emergency rule.
Anderson questioned whether the election board had the authority to amend the voting procedures as extensively as she proposed. Current law requires the use of scanners to process ballots.
“The proposed rule would continue to utilize scanners, but it substantially changes the process by which in-person ballots reach those scanners,” he wrote.
But Marilyn Marks, the voter activist who collaborated with Grubbs on the proposed rule, told board members that failure to pass it could invite post-election challenges.
“Are we going to do what’s easy and convenient and doesn’t cause too much of a burden, or are we going to do what’s legal?” she asked.
It might be easy to stay the course, said Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance. “It’s not going to be so easy when we start seeing threats to seize the machines that are creating this problem or seeing post-election challenges. Those will get really messy, and it will not be so easy.”
Marks said in a brief interview afterward that she feared the inaction by some board members was intentional.
“The MAGA members want chaos,” she said.
In an unrelated decision that also involved voter privacy, a federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit seeking unredacted voter records in Georgia.
Voter names are public, but the state maintains additional personal information attached to those records, including birth dates, driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers.
The federal government wanted that additional information to match identities against databases that could help determine the eligibility of registered voters, such as by checking their immigration status.
U.S. District Judge Victoria Marie Calvert of the Northern District of Georgia determined that Congress never intended for the federal laws referenced by the Justice Department to preempt states’ voter privacy laws.
by Ty Tagami | Oct 1, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Georgia’s Board of Regents formalized the hiring Thursday of the next leader of the state’s 25 public colleges and universities, naming Thomas A. Fanning as chancellor.
The former president and CEO of Southern Company will take control of the University System of Georgia on Jan. 1, the day after Sonny Perdue retires.
The regents named Fanning sole finalist last month.
“As a proud USG graduate, I know firsthand the transformative power of this system,” Fanning said in a statement.
The Georgia Tech graduate, who went on to earn a master’s degree there, said his priorities are to ensure college remains accessible, to support innovation and to drive the state’s economy with talented graduates.
Fanning led Southern Company from 2010 to 2023. He also chaired the Cybersecurity Advisory Committee of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
After leading the university system for four years, Perdue announced his retirement in April, prompting a five-month search for his successor.
Perdue served as agriculture secretary for President Donald Trump during his first term in the White House and as Georgia’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction starting in 2003.
by Ty Tagami | Sep 30, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — With gasoline prices topping $4 a gallon less than two weeks ahead of early voting, Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms pledged to cut driving-related taxes.
Standing outside a BP gas station near Georgia Tech on Wednesday, Bottoms said that if voters choose her as the state’s next governor over Republican Rick Jackson, she will seek to eliminate the state’s 2.25% auto insurance premium tax and roll back the state motor fuel tax to 28 cents a gallon for gasoline and 31.3 cents for diesel.
She also blamed President Donald Trump and the war in Iran.
“This war that Trump projected would last just a matter of days or a couple of weeks, or whatever it was that came out of his mouth at that time, has continued and it’s only getting worse,” Bottoms said.
Her policy rollout came two days after Gov. Brian Kemp, who is backing Jackson, declared a state of emergency to suspend the motor fuels tax for 30 days. The state excise tax is 33.3 cents per gallon of gasoline and 37.3 cents per gallon of diesel.
Bottoms’ new policy proposals came amid a battle for voters’ hearts and minds on one of the top issues in this election: the rising cost of living.
The Jackson campaign fired back, noting that Jackson had already laid out an affordability plan weeks ago. Jackson had said he would cut the state income tax in half and eliminate the state tax on tips and on energy for residential and small-business consumers. He also had said he would push local governments to reduce their property taxes and to reduce building permit delays that can increase housing construction costs.
And Jackson had said he would suspend the motor fuel tax during price spikes.
At the BP with Bottoms, state Sen. RaShaun Kemp, D-Atlanta, attacked Jackson over his investment in a recently announced Texas oil refinery.
Jackson had revealed at a town hall in Blakely that he was the “largest outside investor” in the refinery, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in March. Then, on Wednesday, the publication reported that India’s Reliance Industries had a deal to buy the proposed refinery’s products. The article said Trump had identified Reliance as a project investor while Jackson had said in an unrelated deposition that a company from India was planning to buy the company’s output.
Bottoms used the investment against Jackson.
“He is sending this diesel fuel out of this country while our prices rise,” she said.
(The Jackson campaign on Wednesday repeated its own line of attack on personal finances, calling on Bottoms to disclose the clients of her consulting firm.)
Bottoms said her insurance tax cut would save the average two-car family about $140 a year while the fuel tax rollback would save that family nearly $80 a year. She said she was considering offsetting the revenue loss with “branding opportunities” at Georgia visitor centers.
Other states are scrambling to address rising fuel prices, with political leaders in California, Ohio and Texas seeking ways to lower costs, Politico reported Wednesday. The publication attributed the rising prices to hostilities in Iran and Ukraine, quoting Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, as saying that until those issues are resolved, “you’re just putting Band-Aids on a gaping wound.”
Bottoms urged voters to imagine that Trump is on the ballot, just as he asked his supporters to do at a South Carolina rally in August.
Fearing low turnout in a year when he was not on the ballot, Trump said, “pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot. Just come and vote, it’s so important.”
Early voting starts Oct. 13, and the Bottoms campaign is betting that Trump’s endorsement of Jackson will help her campaign.
“Donald Trump says he wants us to imagine that he is on the ballot,” Bottoms said. “Well, let’s do that.”
by Ty Tagami | Sep 29, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — When Republicans running for office rallied with Gov. Brian Kemp south of Atlanta this week, they rarely mentioned President Donald Trump but repeatedly targeted Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms.
The event at the Monroe County Conference Center in Forsyth Monday night featured GOP candidates up and down the ballot, with gubernatorial nominee Rick Jackson as the headliner.
Before the event started, Kemp signed an executive order suspending the motor fuel tax to offset rising prices, blaming “unstable” global markets.
Both Bottoms and Jackson have said they want to help farmers deal with the rising cost of diesel.
Bottoms has blamed the increases on President Donald Trump and the war in Iran. She mentioned him repeatedly at an event in Atlanta Sunday.
But his name came up only a couple of times at the GOP event, according to a video feed provided by C-SPAN in a partnership with Capitol Beat.
U.S. Rep. Austin Scott, R-Tifton, running for re-election, thanked voters for sending him to Washington to stand with Trump against Iran and that country’s efforts to obtain a nuclear weapon. And Lauren “Bubba” McDonald, vice chairman of the state Public Service Commission, mentioned the president when he said Republicans needed to turn out and vote to show that Georgia is a “Bulldog red” state.
Far more speakers mentioned Bottoms’ name even though Jackson is the only candidate running against her.
Most of them attacked her handling of public unrest during her term as mayor of Atlanta, when Black Lives Matter protests intersected with frustration over COVID-19 disruptions.
State Rep. Tim Fleming, R-Covington, the GOP candidate for Georgia secretary of state, was Kemp’s chief of staff in that era, when, he said, “riots and violence hit the streets of Atlanta, while Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms allowed civil unrest to spiral.”
State Sen. Greg Dolezal, R-Cumming, the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor, noted that police cars burned, businesses were looted and a Wendy’s restaurant on Atlanta’s south side was set ablaze after police fatally shot a man named Rayshard Brooks there.
“Things got so out of control that Governor Kemp had to call in the National Guard — twice,” he said.
Insurance Commissioner John King, running for re-election, is a former police chief.
“Get used to burning patrol cars” if Bottoms wins in November, he warned. “Complete disorder. That’s what they’re trying to get us to forget,” he said of Bottoms’ campaign.
All of this set the stage for Jackson, who talked of cutting taxes, holding government accountable and continuing Kemp’s policies. Jackson is endorsed by Trump, but he did not mention the president. Instead, Jackson focused on his opponent, repeating the criticism of Bottoms’ handling of public safety as Atlanta mayor.
“Leadership stepped back and lawlessness stepped in. That Wendy’s is a symbol of failed leadership,” Jackson said. “As governor, I will back the blue. I will make public safety a daily responsibility.”
With polls reporting approval numbers for Trump dropping, Bottoms has reminded voters that Jackson allied himself with the president.
Jackson said at an April debate that “there’s nobody that supports President Trump more than I do now” and that “I’ll be just like him, with a Southern tone.”
Bottoms said Sunday that she had watched Jackson respond in a C-SPAN interview to a question about how he would help homeless veterans.
“His response was telehealth for homeless veterans would be a solution and then he said it’s an untapped marketplace,” she said. “So that tells you where his mindset is: everything is a business proposition for him. So when he says he wants to be just like Donald Trump with a Southern tone, he’s projecting that.”
Bottoms has repeatedly attacked Jackson over his business dealings, including the contracting his company has done with the state of Georgia and a Texas data center he has invested in.
Much of Jackson’s presentation Monday revisited a story he frequently tells about his childhood. Raised by an alcoholic single mother, he said he wound up a ward of the state, in foster care. As an adult, he became wealthy through a business he founded in the healthcare sector.
He called it “God’s money,” and he talked about how he had helped children in foster care, giving them college scholarships and helping them succeed.
“The state gave me a chance. Now I feel a responsibility to take everything I have lived, everything I have learned and everything I have built and put it to work to help others,” Jackson said. “I’m not running because I have something left to prove. I’m running because I have something else to give.”
